Memory’s job was not only to recall the past but to burnish it.
She thought that to children adult motives and actions must seem as bulking and ominous as dangerous animals seen in the shadows of a dark forest. They were jerked about like puppets, having only the vaguest notions why.
Better than cancer or Alzheimer’s, that prime horror of anyone who has spent his life making a living by his wits.
Do you think... do you think people ever learn anything?
They glanced around at each other almost furtively, embarrassed, as Americans always seem to be, by the raw fact of their own success – as if cash were hardcooked eggs and affluence the farts that inevitably follow an overdose of same.
Pain rises. From the heart to the head pain rises.
We’ll do our business in the East Room. It’s my favorite at this time of day. If you and I didn’t know God is a profitable and self-sustaining construct of the worlds’ churches, the morning light would be almost enough to make us believers again.
Take the dog with you,” I said.
But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me – however briefly – I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall.
He went into the bathroom, set his Coleman lamp on the sink so that it illuminated the mirror, and for the next fifteen minutes he practiced smiling. He was getting very good at it.
For the next ten minutes we talked theology in the green corn while early summer clouds – the best clouds, the ones that float like schooners – sailed slowly above us, trailing their shadows like wakes.
Do people in your world always want only one story-flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?
At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom.
You couldn’t make people behave, and meddling into their affairs – even with the best of intentions – all too often turned friends into enemies.
All of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles, the ones that come when we’re genuinely happy.
You may be a Founding Father and all that, but you still leave an occasional skidmark in your underdrawers.
That instinct, to doubt what women say, it’s always there. To find some reason not to take their word. Men do it... but we do, too. I do it.
Well, don’t that just impregnate the family dog...
One way or another, all the bridges between that time n this one have been burned. Time’s a reach, too, you know, just like the one that lies between the islands and the mainland, but the only ferry that can cross it is memory, and that’s like a ghost-ship – if you want it to disappear, after awhile it will.
He spoke with the patience of a true believer. Or a lunatic. Maybe there’s really no difference.